What can you expect to see from the PMC in 2013?

For 2013 we have a new board, a new structure and a new plan. We want to share what we have been up to, and some of the problems we have been tackling. Why share?

we want to be transparent about the PMC and how we work

we want to be held accountable by each other and our members

we want to give you a chance to offer us feedback and suggestions

we think you find this kind of information interesting and engaging, and creating better online content is part of our plan

First, a bit of history....

2012 was a challenging year for the PMC board

We began 2012 with five board members, a co-ordinator and a time-boxed challenge:take the organization and turn it into an independent legal entity. Previously we were owned byPivotal PM, whohelped grow the organizationto what it is today (36 annual members, 973 online members and 2052 on our mailing list). Without them there would be no PMC - for this we are ever grateful. In 2012 they decided it was time for us to walk on our own two feet.

No small task for a group of six part-timers. And as with any volunteer-based organization we had our own time struggles as well. Scott welcomed a son into the world, Dan was growing his own business and I got hooked into a company acquisition and a 60% travel schedule. I sometimes think if it wasn’t for Rupika’s tireless effort keeping us in shape we may not have made it.

But we did some AMAZING things!

Have you ever created, incorporated and registered a non-profit organization? Yeah neither had we. Running the PMC is a lot of work in itself, here are some other things we achieved in 2012:

broke out from under Pivotal and incorporated as a legal entity with Washington State

applied for 501c(6) status (filed September ‘12, status pending)

created a comprehensive set of bylaws and associated corporate structure

People (way smarter and more experienced than me) often say that recruiting the right people isthemost important factor in scaling a business. This applies to us. For 2013 we more than doubled the size of our board and we have ended up with an energetic, enthusiastic team brimming with ideas. Dave and Tiana did a great job of working redundancy into the bylaws so we no longer have any single points of failure.

However, as with scaling any business, we encountered issues. Being a volunteer organization, we don’t get a whole lot of facetime as a board. Whilst the individual teams meet, the only times we get together as a group are for the monthly events (which don’t leave a lot of collaboration time) and the monthly board meetings (in which we covera lotin 2 hours). Our original strategy of having the teams figure out their own projects, and report back to the board didn’t leave us with a huge amount of alignment. By the end of February we decided we needed to get together and figure it out.

And here it is....

We used dot voting (unconference-style) to prioritize our programs. We agreed that we would all sign off on the plan (alignment) and that we would only commit to one initiative per team, per quarter. Each individual team is still empowered to take on other projects, but these are the ones we have committed to as a board.

Keystone Events Team - start planning for #pcs13 - ProductCamp is the pinnacle of our annual calendar, by planning now we can increase our chances of success

Tools Team - Online Content Strategy - How can we find new members through our web channel, and engage better with our existing base?

Business Intelligence Team -CRM - who are our current customers? - we interact with you guys through many different channels, how can we better understand what works and what doesn’t?

Membership Team - Annual Membership Value Proposition - before we go deeper into acquisition and retention for paid members, we need to understand what is important and valued

Events Team - Speaker Planning- in order to provide value for our monthly tickets we want to make sure we have a pipeline of quality speakers and content, with redundancy built in

Operations Team- Board Meeting Efficiency - how can we make use of the little facetime we have to get the most done?

Logistics Team - Centralized Tasklist and Planning - with so much work going on remotely we want to ensure we have a task management process that provides transparency and makes it easy for people to get things done

Treasury Team- Redundancy in Accounting - We didn’t do a great job of filling our first tax year. This quarter we will get on top of accounting and tax filing and spread the knowledge between the team

So what do you think?

Leave your comments below - we always love to hear your opinion. At the end of the quarter we will share our dashboard and give you a breakdown of Q3.

Do you have something interesting you would like to share with the community? We are always on the look out for guest blogs. Send us your ideas here!

Mara and I are proud of the 2012 Board for accepting and meeting the challenge of taking PMC to the next level. We offer our appreciation, encouragement, and support to the 2013 Board and look forward to PMC's continued growth and success!

Question and suggestion - can the monthly meeting be rotated as to night of the week? I (and I assume others may) have a standing conflict on Thursday evenings or would be at the "kick ass" events you are planning to host. Any chance to rotate between Tuesdays, Wednesday, and Thursdays?

What is the PMC?

The PMC is a non-profit, volunteer driven organization for Product Management professionals. We are based in Seattle. We enable product managers to connect, share, participate and learn from each other. We host monthly events, an online community, job postings and ProductCamp Seattle.

Volunteer for ProductCamp

It is time to start preparing for the ProductCamp Seattle 2015 coming up in October! Last year the PMC and our hearty band of volunteers hosted 220 local product professionals for the one day unconference event. Want to make this year's event even more awesome, be awesome and join the 2015 PCS team. Email everyone@pmcnw.org to join the team of ProductCamp 2015 volunteers!

Get Involved

The PMC hosts 10 monthly events every calendar year. Each event is priced at $25. Events are typically presentations on specific topics of interest to the Product Management community.

We offer an annual pass for $99, providing you access to all monthly events for one calendar year from purchase.